Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager Protects Hyper-V VMs

If you think that Microsoft lags behind VMware in virtual machine (VM) site protection, you might want to take a look at Microsoft's new Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager. On January 16, 2014, Microsoft announced the general availability of Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manger.

The Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manger service is hosted in Windows Azure and it communicates with System Center Virtual Machine Manager to initiate a site-to-site replication of Hyper-V VMs. The VMs being replicated between sites are never stored in Azure. The Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager is the centralized control plane where the replication and recovery configuration and status are stored.

How To Setup Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager

To setup the Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager, you first use the Windows Azure Management Portal to create a Hyper-V Recovery Manager Vault. You can specify which Azure region to use when creating the vault. Next, a Quick Start page is displayed that guides you on how to secure the vault with a certificate, install the Hyper-V Recovery Manager provider on VMM, and then configure the protection and recovery of your VMs. You can dig into the details of setting up the Hyper-V Recovery Manager in Microsoft's step-by-step tutorial.